


Ceiling Fan

by Insomnia_Productions



Category: Original Work
Genre: Homophobia, I wrote this at 1am a year ago and decided to edit it recently, restrospective, short but depressing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-24 06:16:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7497246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Insomnia_Productions/pseuds/Insomnia_Productions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Father got him pills he claimed would fix him, make him normal. I thought he was the one who wasn't normal, but my brother nodded and took the pills, and my father smiled at him for the first time in weeks, so I looked down and didn't say a word.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ceiling Fan

**** I have always been a practical person. I prefer things to be straightforward, unentangled in the web of convention. Puzzles, for instance. There are so many ways to solve them, so many wrong moves, so many possibilities. But, in the end, there is always one, true answer. 

Simple. 

My brother, however, was the opposite. He was an artist, and there was nothing he loved more than random splatters of color, haphazard scribbles across hot-chocolate-stained paper, with no structure or clear pattern. No logical meaning. He always told me that there didn’t have to be. 

Eventually, I understood. If you saw his sketches, you would know. He captured every moment, detail, expression—one could almost hear the sounds, almost imagine being there. But his sketches weren’t perfect, his portraits weren’t angelic. No, that was the beauty of it. He didn’t omit anything. Every wrinkle on my grandmother’s face as she held our newborn cousin, the way my nose wrinkled up when we got a puppy and I couldn’t stop grinning, the scar on my father’s lip that stretched when he spoke and reminded us of his days in war. It was all the imperfections that made his art so perfect. 

My brother drew what he loved. He drew me, our cocker spaniel, the park we played in as children. My highschool dance, with a shadowed background, and shadowed people, and just one couple in the center, glowing, vibrant with splashes of blue and silver—my brother and me, when I couldn’t find a date and he hated seeing me alone.

Yes, he drew whatever he loved. But that turned out not to be such a great thing.

Father was a hard man, changed from the person he was before war. He had returned home paler despite his long days outdoors, and for a long time his hands would not stop shaking. He turned to religion to ease his pain—a church near our house. I visited it, once, to see what was taking up so much of the time my father had once spent teaching my brother and me chess. It was small, but ornate—a cat trying to look like a  tiger . There was a billboard, one that made their opinions very clear. 

At first, Father laughed off their harsh views, telling us that he was a reasonable man. He had seen too much to take their closed-minded beliefs to heart. He was only there for the comfort of God, he would tell us with smiles that stretched his scar so wide it looked more like a blotchy birthmark. And we believed him.

It wasn’t long before he began constantly fingering the cross around his neck, assuring himself that it was still there. Bizarre pamphlets and notebooks filled with strange quotes began to appear on the breakfast table.  He grew furious if we moved them, snatching them away, telling us not to touch them with our sinful hands. He told us that things were going to change, that these notes held the key to our salvation. My brother and I nodded along until the veins in his forehead shrank down, and then watched him scrub at his shiny pamphlets with a cloth,  meticulously removing marks left behind by our fingers. 

He became rapidly more demanding, more suspicious, convinced that we were sinning behind his back. It reached a point where he would search our belongings, looking for… I don’t know what. Sometimes I’d wonder what my mother would do, if she were still alive. Probably nothing.

One day, he rummaged through my brother’s portfolio, expecting to find—girls, I suppose. 

Instead, he found something worse. Worse by his standards, that is, or perhaps those of his church. By that point, I wasn’t certain there was any difference. 

Father found a small collection of sketches, tucked away in the back of the portfolio, all portraying the same boy. I’d seen him around, at school. When Father showed me, I thought nothing of it. They were friends, perhaps. My brother often drew his friends. I told Father not to worry. My brother was pure and obedient; he wouldn’t defy the church. I wonder, had I not pulled the folder away, if what happened next could have been avoided. 

Another image fell out. This was in a different style, drawn by someone else. A simple picture, cute, depicting my brother and that boy perched on two opposite branches of a tree, leaning forward to smile at each other. On the tree, the artist had carefully written a poem, addressed to my brother. 

Looking back, it was sweet. My little brother’s first love and all. 

But at the time,  I wanted to strangle him, scream at him for being so careless. I wanted to cry. I felt the dark chill of fear as Father crumpled the drawing into a ball in his fist and stood up, spilling hot coffee onto my skirt in his haste—a knee-length, pastel blue, unpleated skirt, the same soft shade as all the others he bought me that year. His pristine, perfect daughter. 

Once, Father’s voice was so quiet that we could barely hear him from upstairs when he called.

But that afternoon, the entire neighborhood must have heard when he screamed for my brother to come downstairs. 

I was sent out of the room. I could hear murmuring, yelling, crying, and then my brother ran out and locked himself in his room.

I never found out what happened, but I can guess. 

After that day, my brother smiled less. He rarely went outside; his tan skin turned pale. He drew, but no longer used colors beyond black, white, and red. I keep them in a drawer, now, away from his other sketches. 

Father got him pills he claimed would fix him, make him normal. I thought  _ he  _ was the one who wasn’t normal, but my brother nodded and took the pills, and my father smiled at him for the first time in weeks, so I looked down and didn’t say a word.

My brother stopped leaving his room beyond rushing to school early in the morning and returning home to lock up again immediately after.

We got letters home from teachers, worried teachers. Father told them there were some minor family problems, then later that he was ill. 

Once, in the early days, we got a letter from the boy in the pictures. Followed by another, another, another. Father threw them out the moment he saw the handwriting on the envelope, but I would take them and read them in my room. For a time, I would slip them under my brother’s door, in the hope that they could shake him out of the daze he’d fallen into. One day, I went downstairs to see my brother standing in front of the glowing fireplace. He looked at me for a long moment, and then he walked away, leaving me to clear the remnants of unwanted words scrawled in the messy hand of the boy in the tree. Something in his eyes scared me, the blank expression on his face lingering in my mind as I cleared his mess. I stopped giving him the letters after that.

I kept them instead, rereading them in sequence, staying up into the late hours of night to trace the words that were already stained with my own tears. I would do this until my heart felt like a black hole, and then I would flee my room, wandering downstairs between tears and tapwater. Many times, I would see light sneaking out from under his door, slipping between the cushions he’d tried to block it with. Sometimes I stood outside his room, hand raised, wishing I had the courage to knock. Other times, I wondered what he was doing in there, if he was drawing or crying or staring out the window and thinking about the boy. Most times, I turned away and returned to my room.  

One day, he didn’t come down; not an uncommon occurrence, but by two thirty I grew worried. I went upstairs. His door was locked, as usual, and he wouldn’t respond to my calls. 

I fetched the spare key and opened the door.

When my mother was still alive, she’d begged my father to get rid of the ceiling fans. She hated how ugly and bulky they looked, and said that every time they spun, she was certain they’d fall on her. I, a young child, believed every word. I, too, was certain that the fans couldn’t hold their weight. I tried to hang onto them, to see if they could carry me. My mother would pull me away, telling me that they could not, that they would fall and crush me. She said that the weight of a human body was far too much for a mere ceiling fan to bear. 

She was wrong.

 

**Author's Note:**

> ;—;


End file.
